Claim Watch: Battalia

Four-year-old Liam's Map filly from the deep Blitey family runs for $7,500 today

It’s been a few months since I’ve added to the Claim Watch series on this blog, and over this past weekend, this filly caught my eye while perusing the entries at Parx, so I decided this would be a good excuse to bring back the series. For those who may not know, the intent of this series is to identify fillies and mares in the claiming ranks with the pedigree to be useful broodmare prospects. These may not necessarily be the types of mares that will be consistently producing stakes winners, but have bloodlines that suggest they could be a productive addition to a small-time breeder’s broodmare band. As a reminder, these posts are a hypothetical exercise and not a recommendation to buy a horse - I have never put eyes on this filly, I’m just making an attempt to extrapolate based on the publicly available information.

Battalia

Battalia comes into this $7,500 non-winners of three lifetime out of a gate-to-wire win at the same level for non-winners of two as the odds-on favorite, and she’s listed as the 5/2 morning line favorite for this event.

Battalia has put together a solid resume for the level, and has used her speed to post two wins, two seconds, and a third in eight lifetime starts. Although her two wins have come at the $10,000 maiden claiming level and $7,500 claiming level, I think that her speed is a valuable asset and positive for her prospects as a broodmare in the future, as it seems, at least anecdotally, as though horses who show speed as a racehorse tend to produce faster offspring than deep closers.